Leaksville-Draper-Spray Triplets
The Leaksville-Draper-Spray Triplets were a Class D team representing three adjacent North Carolina towns in Rockingham County, all later consolidated into the single city of Eden. They were the most durable franchise in the Bi-State League's nine-year run, the only club to field a team in every season from 1934 through 1942. The name was functional: Leaksville, Draper, and Spray shared the same industrial economy of textile mills and tobacco operations, and the Triplets were the combined baseball expression of that community. The team won the regular-season pennant in 1935 and again in 1941.
In 1936, the Brooklyn Dodgers assigned Clyde Sukeforth to manage the Triplets as player-manager. Playing with partial sight in one eye after a hunting accident, Sukeforth hit .365 with seven home runs in 51 games while leading the team to a third-place finish. Nine years later, working as a Dodgers scout, Sukeforth arranged Branch Rickey's first meeting with Jackie Robinson, was present in the room when Robinson was signed, and then as interim manager on Opening Day 1947, wrote Robinson's name into the Dodger lineup as the first manager of an integrated major league team in the modern era. In 1941, Wes Ferrell, who had won 20 or more games in six consecutive seasons with Cleveland and Boston in the 1930s, managed the Triplets through the regular season to a first-place finish at 64-46.
After the Bi-State League closed in 1942, the franchise continued in the Carolina League from 1945 through 1947, then briefly in the Blue Ridge League in 1948 before folding. The Bi-State League was a Class D circuit that ran from 1934 through 1942, fielding teams from the tobacco and textile country straddling the Virginia-North Carolina border. The league did not resume after World War II.
